WESTPORT WHALE WATCHING AND MARITIME HISTORY ADVENTURE- *Sundays with Sunny and Friends!
FULL DAY TOUR

UPCOMING DATES: March 23, 2008 - Call to today to reserve your spot! 206.650.5795

Tour Length: 10 ½ Hours
Tour Code: ES03
Pick-Up: Southcenter
Departing: 8:00 a.m.
Returns: 6:30 p.m.
Activities: Whale Watching, Walking, & Educational Sightseeing
Difficulty: Easy
Carbon Footprint:
Min No of Passengers:

Inclusions: South Seattle pick up and drop off; highly qualified and knowledgeable naturalist guide; travel in luxury vehicle; whale watching tour with U.S. Coast Guard certified boats and licensed crews; excellent casual lunch; selected fruit, energy bars, soda, juice, and tea; all entry and parking fees; and comprehensive commentary.

Description: Enjoy this Sunday with tour guide Sunny Walter, professional wildlife photographer, nature photo tour leader, and co-author of “Washington Nature Weekends, 52 Adventures in Nature.”

The Pacific population of gray whales has been making its annual migration from winter breeding lagoons in Baja California to summer feeding grounds in the Arctic seas for thousands of years. The first wave of adults and juveniles congregate and feed at river mouths from northern California to Vancouver Island as they migrate to the icy, nutrient-rich Bering Sea. We will take a whale watching tour out of Westport to see them at the mouth of the Chehalis River in Grays Harbor and out into the ocean.

Gray whales belong to the baleen whale family, which means they do not have teeth to catch prey. Instead they have hundreds of fringed baleen plates hanging from their upper jaw, forming a sieve to filter plankton, small fish, and krill from the water. Their only predators are man, large sharks, and orcas, which are teethed whales and have been known to occasionally attack the much larger gray whales in Grays Harbor.

Gray whales live for 30 to 40 years, weigh 20-40 tons, and measure from 35 to 50 feet long; calves average about 15 feet long. They have a mottled gray appearance due to the barnacles which embed themselves into the hide – a large gray whale may carry several hundred pounds of barnacles. Gray whales vocalize in low frequencies, producing sounds to find their way in darkness and to communicate with other gray whales.

Winter calving usually takes place in the shallow waters near the Baja coast. By mid-February newly pregnant females leave the lagoons, followed by adult males, which are still courting them, then the juveniles, and finally the mothers and new calves. These whales spend their summers in the Bering Sea getting fat by diving to the shallow sea floor and sucking up the bottom sediment like a huge vacuum cleaner. They may put on an accumulation of 6 to12 inches of oily blubber by fall, which acts as an energy reserve during the winter months in Baja.

When we arrive in Westport, we will check into Advantage Tours and take a quick stroll along the dock to see Black Turnstone and Surfbirds on the rocks. We will then board our whale watching boat at Float 12 and head out on a 2 ½ hour trip across Grays Harbor and out along the coast to visit the “whale-hole,” a popular place where gray whales stop and play for a few weeks. We are likely to see either the newly pregnant females or the juveniles in March; the friendly juveniles are known to get up close and personal by nudging charter boats with their noses. It’s okay to scratch them if they ask for it – and they do.

We will look and listen for whales blowing or spouting; they generally blow 3-5 times in 15-30 second intervals before raising their flukes and submerging for 3-5 minutes. If we are lucky we may see whales performing the rarer “spyhopping” where the whale raises its head 8 or more feet above the water, sometimes turning slowly to look around. Breaching is even more impressive when ¾ of the whale’s body bursts from the water, pivots, and falls back with a huge splash.

Be sure to dress warmly, bring light rain gear, and wear nonskid shoes or rubber boots. There will be coffee on board the tour boat and Evergreen Escapes will provide a box lunch from Organic To Go (to eat on the boat or afterward). If you need to take Dramamine, please take it several hours before boarding the boat. If you bring cameras to capture the majesty of the whales you will want to cover them with plastic to avoid salt spray damage. We will have binoculars for everyone.

After our whale watching tour, we will take a guided tour of the Maritime Museum to discover more about the history of the Westport area: fishing and whaling, cranberries, beach erosion, and the Coast Guard. We will then visit the lens building, which was built to showcase the restored and prized 19th century Destruction Island Lighthouse Fresnel lens. It looks like a giant upside-down disco strobe light, reflecting lightning-bolt-shaped patterns of light in symmetrical directions all over the room.

We will also visit the whale house, where the museum showcases the partial skeleton of a blue whale. These whales are the largest mammal to ever inhabit the earth; blues in the northern Hemisphere are on the average 75 to 80 feet long and weight over 100 tons – three times as heavy as a gray whale. It is estimated that more than 200,000 blues inhabited the planet before the long slaughter by whalers. Unlike the success story of the gray whale, the blue whale population has been slow to recover, with perhaps only 10,000 to 14,000 or so remaining.

The Westport Historic Grays Harbor Lighthouse, Washington’s tallest lighthouse, was constructed in 1897. In 2004 restoration began to bring the lighthouse up to its previous glory. We will climb to the viewing platform to see the lighthouse and listen as our tour guide brings its history to life.

To end our day we will take a short stroll on the blacktop path along the dunes to experience the ocean shore and find out more about the ecosystem and history of the area. This is part of Westport's Maritime History Trail, a bike and pedestrian pathway that extends from the museum to the lighthouse. Our quest for whales ends with a 2 hour drive back to Seattle, arriving back at Southcenter around 6:30pm.

The eastern north Pacific gray whale population was reduced to a few thousand individuals by 1946 due to over-hunting and was declared an endangered species. Their recovery is a huge success story, with numbers now estimated to be between 19,000 and 23,000 – close to their original numbers before whaling decimated them.

The Makah tribe hunted whales out of Neah Bay in the northwest tip of Washington for at least 1,500 years. This hunt was halted in the 1920s because the eastern North Pacific gray whale population was severely reduced by commercial whaling. When gray whales were removed from the Endangered Species list in 1994, the Makah decided to exercise their right to hunt since, by federal law, they are entitled to hunt and kill one baleen whale each year. The Makah successfully hunted a gray whale in 1999 with the support of the U.S. government and the International Whaling Commission. This license to hunt one whale per year is now in limbo and is very controversial.

In contrast, the north Atlantic population is now extinct and the Korean or western north Pacific stock is very depleted. The main threats to the Pacific population are now noise, pollution, and disruption of the marine environment.

This tour can be customized as a private tour, call or email for a quote.